


Riding the Gap

by plsnskanks (orphan_account)



Category: Eddsworld - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, M/M, Violence, come on you know this by now, general bullshit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-27
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2018-12-20 11:13:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11919720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/plsnskanks
Summary: It's a slow kind of thing





	Riding the Gap

It wasn’t always like this. You think, that’s the worst part of this. The part that makes this so hard to drop, so hard cut out this festering, bleeding part of you even if you know it’s slowly killing you.

It wasn’t always this way.

You remember being sixteen and lonely and angry. Angry about the cards you had been dealt. Angry about the way your foster parents just fundamentally couldn’t love you like their own. Angry that smoking cigarettes behind the back alley and being dubbed as “cool” wasn’t enough to take the edge off of all this deep cutting emotion that was pulping your insides slowly as the days passed.

So you’re tired and you’re draining and you’re on your last leg because heartache has spread well past your heart and started eating the marrow of your bones and everything else vital too.

But then you meet Edd. This kid that has no reason to smile but does it anyways. He seems like a morning person, he draws so well you admit you’re a little envious, and he likes monsters and zombies and he is a nice kid and you like him.

Sincerely, really, you do.

But then you meet Tord. And you hate that kid. Probably because he is immediately known as Edd’s best friend and you don’t like the well of jealously that rises but, it’s there and there is nothing you can do with it.

You deck him in the face over him accidently elbowing your lunch tray out of your hands. It’s petty. It’s cruel. It lands you both in detention and he’s sitting there looking glum and pissed off and you feel a little vindicated for some reason.

A little less when he gets you in his grip after detention and you think this is it. He’s going to beat the shit out of you, your foster parents are going to snap over the detention and you’re going to be out and done. Bounced to someone else who doesn’t want the burden of trying to make you a decent person.

“You got a lot of issues, don’t you?” Tord says in this miserably thick accent and he still sounds pissed but maybe somewhere under that he seems like he is trying. Trying to understand. 

“Says the guy who can barely speak English and sounds like some commie fucker,” You spit and you’re certainly waiting for that fist now, but still. He holds off. Lets you go.

“Edd. He likes you. I do not get it. You are never happy, why?” And once again though you try to look for some deeper motive or insult or some kind of dig at you and your history. You come up short. 

“I don’t know.” It’s simple. It’s easy. It’s the most honest thing you have said about yourself in a very, very long time.

“You should think on that, and if you have answer, I would maybe like to hear,” he says. “You have a phone?”

You nod and he holds out his hand. You want to slap it away but you think about going home tonight. About getting yelled at for detention. About going to sleep alone and having to wait until tomorrow for Edd to make some dumb pun so you can stop feeling like such a pile of dog shit. So you hand it to him.  
_______

You get in a fight with your foster dad. A knock down drag out fight and your foster mom calls the cops and so you freak and you run even though you are the one with the bloody nose and the torn hoodie and the shattered sense of self.

You run and you run and you run. And you don’t know where to go. 

Edd hits you as an option but there’s this thing about Edd. Edd has a nice life. A nice family. A nice home. He doesn’t need more friends, because he has a lot of those too. He probably only reached out to you initially because he felt bad and now you have to watch yourself. Not become too much of a burden. Be careful about what he thinks about you.

But Tord. You don’t know him or his life. But he doesn’t give that vibe. That clean cotton, homegrown, lily white suburb boy feel. He gives you a different one, a completely solo frequency you have never heard before. And it strikes you as somewhere in tune with your own.

So you show up bloody on his doorstep and you text him instead of the doorbell because you don’t think you can face an adult freaking out over this situation quite yet. He tells you to come around back. He opens the screen door, puts a finger to his lips and the two of you creep by the dark living room illuminated only by flickers of blue casting ghastly shadow puppets on the walls.

He lets you sleep in his car for a solid week. You go to school, you shower in the gym and he sneaks your hoodie into the wash once or twice and lends you shirts and pants to wear. You eat sandwiches for a week too and even though it gives you the shits and you have to crap in the bushes some of the time, it’s better than home and your grateful for that.

He sits out in the car with you, for a lot of it. Late at night the two of you lean back your seats and just talk as the dark skies roll slowly overhead.

“I think I figured out why I am so angry,” You say.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I can’t forget the people who forgot about me.”

They sit in silence for a while. Tord doesn’t bother looking at you, doesn’t turn over to face you as he speaks.

“I won’t forget you.”

“No?”

“I don’t think I could if I tried.”

You smile and hopes Tord can’t see it from where he is resting staring out at the windshield where little specks of crystal are beading on the dash as the sprinklers turn on.

“You’re just one of those people that sticks.”  
________

You go home eventually. Face your parents. They breakdown. Your foster mom seals you into this solid hug that would make you nauseous if it wasn’t so painfully tight. You hear the bones in your shoulders pop out of place. 

Your foster dad sits you down and sincerely apologizes for hitting you. He asks if you are okay. Where you were, and when you don’t want to tell him, he respects that. He respects your space.

So you think maybe this is an okay sort of life. This sort of laminar flow, slipstream easy pace. You aren’t quite breathing on your own but no one is crushing your ribcage either.

You tell Tord trusting people is like giving them organs. Giving them a piece of yourself that you need to get out of all this alive and asking them to safe guard it.

He asks you what organ he would be.

“I think… I think you’d be a lung,” You say and as you do you close your eyes and lean back into the same dirty seat you were sleeping on a while ago.

“A lung,” He snorts. “That’s not romantic at all.”

Romantic? Why would that be-. Ah. You remember, you made this whole thing you two had a while ago, you gave it a name. You two are a thing. Not to anyone else of course, hell no. But to each other. You’re a thing.

“Why can’t I have your heart? Does someone else have it?” Tord asks and maybe the hint of jealousy in his voice shouldn’t make you feel so good but it does.

“You’re my lung because someone took the other one a while ago, and so if you leave or take this one, I’m done in. That’s it.”

Tord looks at you, you can feel it, but you refuse to watch him try and dissect you, try and pin out your mental biology in some brightly lit room where he can pick out and identify all your past traumas, and unravel them, figure out how simplistic and stupid they all are.

“You’re kind of a freak, huh Tom?”

You shrug.

“See this is why, I can’t forget. No one is going to be weird the way you are, huh monster boy?”

You get the image of this big purple monstrosity, wrecking the town, fighting tanks and hiding amongst smoldering embers and when you’re done and the military has mortally wounded you and you’re bleeding out ichor or whatever it is you really bleed deep down, everyone else is watching you die a monster.

But Tord’s there and he’s the only one that watches you die a man.

You smile and you look back at him, with his thin lips and hook nose and that stupid cigarette he hasn’t taken one drag of since he lit it, letting the ashes crumble down onto the seats you two rest on, it’s soft glow the only sort of light apart from one flickering street lamp a few houses down. 

It’s quiet and it’s calm and your heart hurts in this kind of tender way. It’s a good hurt, the kind that makes you forget deeper, older hurts, so you want to feel it a little more and that’s why you crawl over the center console and grab his hood in your two hands and let him try and figure out where to blindly put out his cigarette as you push your lips against his.

And so the dark night gets a little darker as your hands find his face and his hands find your lower back and even though it’s in a dingy dirty car, having it be here. It’s okay, it’s alright. You don’t deserve better, you never expected better. You could only dream it would ever be this nice.  
_____

Sometimes alone at night you cry because it’s so nice. Because you are living the days you dreamed about bouncing from house to house as a kid, hiding under stairwells alone at school, sitting alone in rundown buildings watching the dying light fade throw narrow shutters.  
_____

You two fight as well. Heaven knows you do. Because you two aren’t perfect and the fact remains that Tord sometimes just likes to get a rise out of you, and sometimes he pushes a bit too far. So you fight until Edd and Matt are both telling you two to piss off. 

You two climb in the car and your seething and he drives until you aren’t and then you two pull over and do something regrettable to Tord’s back seats.

Seriously. You should pay to get them cleaned for his birthday, because god knows he won’t. You think he has some sort of pride in having his car practically be a dumpster.

That you lost your virginity. Ugh.

He has this way of doing that though, of working you down and stripping you of any ounce of dignity. You fight him but it ends up being token in the end because when push comes to shove he’s got your last lung and knows how to use it.

It’s you coming to knock on his door after a week long silence, it’s you coming to kiss at his neck and murmur tender apologies.

It’s always going to be you that breaks first and you wish that was the end of it but it isn’t.

Because sometimes he just goes digging. Whether it’s for some light form of entertainment or he is just reaching his hand far, far deeper than he should, you don’t always know. You feel like a pumpkin some days, like he is reaching in and scooping out your vitals, parsing through them and getting a good view.

He knows all the buttons, all the switches. He has you coming apart to pieces by just jamming his thumb in all the wrong gaps.

It’s tumultuous and you keep looking at him, turning him over, looking for his cracks and hairline faults so you can figure out to do the same to him. Partially for your own sanity, partially for his. But he’s sealed off and though he has cracks, everyone does, his are well cemented over.

But he’s got yours and he’s got them good.

You shut down and didn’t talk for a week, he comes up and just takes you into his arms and murmurs something about how “I missed talking to you, I missed just being with you.”

His hands don’t stray anywhere they shouldn’t and they are carding through your hair gently and then all of a sudden he has you in his lap, head on shoulder, tears leaking onto it and soaking into the hood as you gasp out all the pent up resentment.

Meanwhile part of you is screaming that you are going to end up with no air, no way to breathe. He is going to get bored and smash everything underfoot.

So as much as you really, really love him, another part of you hates Tord so sincerely, hates the part of him the side steps every single safe guard you put up to push him off and away and keep the broken parts of you a little less broken.

You hate the part of you that knows even though this situation feels forced, it is something you yourself have to own up to creating. You opened the door. You invited him in, and now he’s slipped up into every part of you and wedged his fingers in all the cracks.  
_____

“You think this all just happened to you? That you were some victim of circumstance?” Tord laughs as you are on the ground, fumbling for balance, trying to find a way up.

“You thought that you could have all this without earning it? Without any sort of justification? Wake up Tom, wake up!” 

Tord is kicking you in the side so hard you are collapsing onto the ground wheezing, your whole side is agony and you can’t breathe, you can’t suck in air, you’re on the ground terrified and Tord is towering over you and you can’t even bring yourself to crawl away because where do you have to go outside of all this?

Who is going to value something that has depreciate exponentially since the day it was created, who is going to bother to look hard enough to find what slim merits there barely are.

You wake up in broken glass and something crusting on your face as a warm hand holds you and wipes at your mouth.

“You can’t do this anymore,” he murmurs softly. “You can’t, you’re going to kill yourself.”

“Are you mad at me?” You ask in a hoarse voice.

“I’m not mad Tom, I’m never mad, just in pain when you are like this. I need you to be okay on your own. Don’t do this anymore, please, please, don’t do this anymore.”

He isn’t demanding you, or even asking. It hits you that Tord, smug, silent, strength in his step Tord.

He’s begging you.

“Okay.”  
_____

He’s there for you. Day after day, night after night. Sometimes things are good for months on end. Sometimes you tip backwards and there are entire weeks where you can’t bother to get up. But he’s there for you and he’s waiting for you and you think maybe he does, genuinely, maybe he does.

That he was a good choice.

A good decision. The first one to turn up true out of all the false positives. 

You think this he takes you out for a drive for no reason. Just to drive. With the radio singing some song from a time that seemed a sort of perfect you can’t help feel is a bit beyond you now.

It’s you two and the radio voices fading in and out of static ether as you ride the slipstream highway, the milky way of headlights chasing you at the tail. You two are in this sort of dead space between groups of cars. Red tail lights leer hauntingly in the distance up ahead as the star system behind you ghosts in and out of the fog and you two are just riding the gap of dead space in between.

It’s you two and the solo dark, headlights cutting throw it as you watch distant shapes morph and tumble by alongside you two.

And you love him. You honestly think you might, that you really might. You think about him being gone tomorrow and you don’t think you could drink enough alcohol to compare to that level of pain.  
_____

You don’t think so. You think it’s going to be easy. That whenever something goes wrong, because let’s face it, it inevitably will, that it will all be over very quickly.

You don’t mind trusting him, letting him take you higher and higher than you have ever been because you figure when he drops you the free fall will kill you instantly. You will fall in this weightless bliss and the smash into a bunch of little bloody giblets on the grey dead asphalt.

That’s what you think. 

Reality, is in fact, that romanticizing suffering only makes its blunt force hit harder and with more impact because you let your guard down. Sixteen years of misery and you let him get you to drop it in a couple months.

You had moved into a house with him. Relationship still on the down low. So when he leaves you pretend a lot of things, act angry, indifferent.

You’re mostly angry.

You tell Edd you’re drinking to celebrate him being gone and he rolls his eyes and leaves you, heading off to go cry on Matt’s shoulder about his stupid best friend up and leaving without warning.

As if he thinks you don’t understand how he feels. As if he thinks you actually can get some sort of joy out of this situation. As if, right now, the drink in your hands is the only thing that’s going to take the edge off the razor sharp thoughts cutting up any valid train of thought that is trying to take you away from him.

You are so spiteful about all this. But when he’s gone you realize something. You can still get up when you wake up each morning. You have this raw pain in your gut that is like being disemboweled on a daily basis but the fact that everyone else is so cut up about it too makes you feel, feel a little more human.

You eat breakfast. You go to work. You come home. And Tord isn’t there anymore but Edd is and he is coping and so you tell him you can listen. You can be his ear if he needs it.

Edd looks at you warily for a while at those offers. He pushes you off. Even tells you to go sober up. And yeah. That one hurts, you know he can see that it hurts when he watches the of pain on your face and reflects back guilt in response as you angrily shove back the chair and go stalk off to maybe try dialing Tord’s dead end number again.

But he comes around. He talks about it. Tells you about how they met when he had just moved here. How Tord could barely speak English and what he could was unintelligible because of his accent.

“He kept talking to me and I hated it, because I was young and stupid and he was annoying and clingy. But then he comes to me with these two tickets to some stupid zombie movie. And you know me, who is gonna say no to that? So we go and I can’t sleep the whole next week and when I go to school he is looking dead tired too, so that weekend he comes over for a sleepover and I think it was the first solid night either of us got since that stupid movie.”

Edd laughs and you join in.

“He was always like that, there when I needed him. Sometimes I worried that he was hiding what was eating him deep down. You know? He was always my friend but I don’t know if the reverse was true,”  
Edd says, and he is looking off at the cracks between the floor boards and you wonders what he sees there.

“I think Tord will be alright, maybe he just needs a little space right now,” You say. Because part of you wants it to be true. Underneath everything you want that hope.

“Yeah, he always was the kind to go off and lick his wounds then come back. Never had to apologize to him as stupid as it sounds. Just needed to let him go and he’d come back on his own like nothing happened.”

Edd sighed.

“It’s funny though, I always had this feeling around halfway through highschool that I fucked things up really bad.”

“How so?”

“He just, he didn’t get distant, but I always felt like, there was some part of him that wasn’t there anymore, y’know? He was my best friend and he said I could ask him anything and he would tell me, but I just… I knew.”

Edd is looking at his hands and his face crumbles into something raw and broken and that’s how you are reminded that Edd knew him first and Edd saw parts of Tord that you probably never did. You never got Tord to do the funny snort laugh the way Edd did or brought out the silly goofy spastic dance Tord. You never wrestled with Tord and forced him to smell his own balls.

You always got calm, sober, attentive, gentle Tord. Weighted Tord, grounded Tord. Maybe just anchored Tord.

So you put your hand on Edd’s back and you say, “I’m sorry Edd, I really am.”

Edd nods. He looks at him, with misty eyes and your heart hurts, both for your own loss and Edd’s.

“Do you really not feel anything for him? You don’t care at all? I know you two fought a lot and didn’t really care for each other.”

You close your eyes for a long moment, and when you opens them you have your resolve, “Edd, we were dating. Maybe still are. I don’t know.”

Edd looks at you, mouth hanging open. Blinks a bit. Gets up and leaves.  
_____

It takes a while for him to come around. He says it feels like one of the biggest lies he has ever had to deal with. So you leave him alone even though it compounds your misery because if there is anything you can respect, it’s someone else space.

He does come around though, late at night, and that’s how you two start piecing together who Tord was, filling in the gaps, finding the commonalities and differences in his behavior. Tord was always a good shoulder to cry on. He got mad at you more frequently but more deeply hurt by Edd. Spent more time with Edd but was willing to cancel almost anything for you.

You learn how many outings Tord canceled because on a whim you were drunk and needed someone, or you were lonely, you were hurt.

Edd doesn’t seem to resent you for this though. He asks you questions, asks what you two talked about but doesn’t pry too deeply. Eventually the questions slow and he seems a little more satisfied, and you know? You do too. You feel a little at peace knowing Tord seemed to be doing alright, a little better having some more of the puzzle pieces.

So when Edd tells you, he thinks Tord will come around, it’s a lot easier for you to believe that he believes that instead of initially believing only in his desperation for wanting that to be true.

The ache is there, but it’s fading into the white noise a little more and that makes it all a bit easier to lay your head down at night.  
_____

When Tord comes back into your life it’s eerie. He has the same face, but you can tell something under the surface is different. You look into his eyes and you see the face of someone that makes you hurt so intensely by mere proximity that you leave the house after a few curt exchanges.

It was like looking at a zombie. An alien. Body snatcher. 

You never really knew your parents. You never had grandparents. You never had a friend that passed away unexpectedly. You have no frame of reference for what death feels like.

But this is the closest thing you think you can get to it.

You have dreams where he beat you to shit and you are on the kitchen floor basically trying to pick up your teeth and put them back into your mess of a mouth as he berates you, laughs at you and a part of you knows that Tord will never quite exist. That he will never be that far gone.

But a part of you, the part of you that acted in that dream knows that if he did, you would be there like you were in that dream, under his boot at the slightest hope of affection. He could string you out for miles. You’d walk bloody for him.

So when he comes to you in the interim after he apparently fucks up Matts face over some petty spat and before everything goes to shit, you let him in.

And you let him retake parts of you that you had so adamantly told yourself were locked down, locked away from him. He’s there now, more filled out, bigger. He has these rough hands that feel at you, caress you and you wonder what they’ve been doing the last few years.

What or who have been touching them. You ask.

“Did you move on?” Is there someone new?

“I told you, I can’t. I can’t,” he says.

You slap him across the face, “You’re hurting me,” you say even though he isn’t touching you.

“I know, it’s mutual, believe me, you aren’t doing this alone,” he says and he is trying to hug you but you push back against his hold.

“I did it alone! How else do you describe what happened?” 

“I suffer when you do,” he says. You fist a hand in his hair and pull his face inches apart from yours.

“Do me a favor and stop being such a bloody masochist.”

“What would you rather me be?” he says, breath ghosting your face. It smells like smoke, like cigarettes, you scrunch up your face and let go of him as you pull back and look him dead in the eyes.

“Be the part of you you’re afraid of.”

He closes his eyes. “I can’t.”

“Seems like that’s a lie, I thought we didn’t do that,” you push.

“I can’t do that, I need this one thing Tom, this one space with you.”

“You don’t have that anymore. You lost that when you left,” You enunciate everything slowly, years of anger creeping into each syllable as you bite it off cleanly. Tord’s face contorts into this slow building sort of agony that washes over his features and you see this valley, this deep Mariana’s low, before it rapidly spikes and runs off into something else entirely.

You don’t remember what happens next. Not really. It is there in bits and pieces but by the time it’s over the hotel mirror is shattered both of you are bleeding and then you are in some surreal battle of life and death and all that anger flashing across his face is yours, now you own it, you can feel it through this mutual lifeline you two share.

He fires that missile you fire your gun and in that moment, purely, whole heartedly…

You want that fucker immolated, body, soul and mind. And you know he feels the same. You two are mutually assured destruction, a seven on the INES, your heart is heavy metal sinking faster than Three Mile. You aren’t sure what kicked off this fission but you know only one of you is going to make it out alive, at most.

You try waking up.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

From a dream that seems to be stretching on for months and you aren’t sure how much of reality is wasting away while you looked for the exit route.

How much of you is wasting away on the other side.

In your dream he’s bleeding out against the concrete wall, and your heart is dropping into your stomach as you look at him. That’s your blood on the wall, not literally but it may as well be. Because the air you pull through your lungs is the same that he exhales, he’s caught you, drug you in so hard and so fast and you’re stuck in the pull of his very being.

But now he’s dying, fading out like last note, the final song, this wavering thin thing set against the background din of a world that is full ready to move on when his solo symphony putters out. But you know it won’t die for you the way it will die for everyone else.

He’ll be living in memory, he’ll haunt and stalk your idle thoughts until waking is like drowning and dreaming is the new par for being able to breath, for being able to function. That high wavering note will live on inside you, a mental tinnitus, shrieking to drown out the calm soothing indifference of reality.

That’s you. 

That’s you now.

Now that he’s gone in that smoldering wreck of a robot and there are tears eking out your eyes as Edd tries to talk to you about something mundane. The weather, groceries, what do you want to eat, did you eat, when did you last eat.

You should really, really, eat Tom.

He asks why you care so much and it isn’t that, it isn’t, you’ll swear up and down that it isn’t because it’s true.

It’s just that with him gone you don’t care. Not for his absence but for anything. That’s it, when he left he took every ounce of value in your life and its this flat line with no spark and your dying inside and the only thing that hurts anymore is how much you want to care, how much you want to feel bad at how distraught Edd is over your fading figure, or the way Matt won’t even be in the room with you because he knows, he knows deep down that after it all…

If he were able to show up on your step, bloody and torn apart, but with the words “I’m sorry “ on his lips, you know without a doubt you would forgive him. Not for him, but for you. And that irks you it does. You’d hate that part of you the most if you had the energy to hate yourself anymore.

But you don’t.

You don’t eat anymore, you don’t sleep, because you wake up tired anyways, so you stare out the window a lot. You go walking a lot. You get lost a lot and come back and Matt still won’t look at you and Edd is trying, trying so hard to recoup the loss of his best friend while simultaneously trying not to rot inside out over worry for you.

And you can feel it, the weight of the emotions that you don’t feel anymore, overflowing leaking down from the ceiling where their owners sit restlessly above you as you try to nurse a glass of vodka at the dinner table.

And so you leave. To get away from it. To get away from the emotions you can only feel the absence of despite being their root cause.  
________

You hit a low point, staying the dirty motel a few miles away from home. Blow your last pit of cash buying enough booze to get you absolutely shitfaced.

Like. Danger zone. Shit faced.

Especially since you haven’t eaten in twenty four. So you drink and you drink and it is good. Like being on a rollercoaster. You laugh at your own inside jokes and Tord is this distant thought, a sailboat way out in the bay and you’re on the shore making sand angels and having a whale of a time.

Until your stomach twists in that familiar way and you are hearing his voice saying, “Not again why do you do this? Every time Tom, why I thought you were happy?”

And you don’t know why, you want to tell him. You don’t. You were so happy and it is all going wrong and you don’t know why you only seem to function when you are in excruciating pain. Your life is a flat line of mediocrity outside of all this.

You throw up. You want to throw up in the toilet but you can’t walk so you crawl but you only make it to the smooth linoleum before holding back isn’t an option.

So you throw up. Again. And again. And again.

Until you can’t. So you dry heave, and that one is worse. Your body is wringing itself of everything and by the time you finish you can’t physically or mentally bring yourself up out of this low so you lie in it. You close your eyes and you can feel his fingers there, pulling your hair out of your face, wiping it back even though it’s plastered in puke.

And he looks at you and you look at him and there’s no revulsion there, no pity, no look of guilt. He know you and he understands that this is just a setback on the path to recovery.

He knows you can make it up out of this even though you keep falling and you are going to keep trying, keep trying for him, because He believes in the you that you can’t quite see yet but maybe someday you will crest that hill and see the same thing that makes him look at you that way.  
____

You feel someone lifting your head out off the ground, hear a light groan, a whispered, “God Tom.”

“Tord?”

The hand drops your head and it slams painfully into the ground. 

“God Tom, get up on your own.”

You try to get up but slip on the wet floor. Wet with what, you don’t want to know.

You look up into Matt’s blurry face, coming into focus for a second to realize, yes indeed that is a black eye. 

“What happened?”

“Tord. Tord happened. We’ve been over this. Tom you can’t be around him anymore, nothing good will come out of him.”

“Nothing good is going to come out of me,” You moan as a wave of pain hits as you try to dodge the stray beam of light seeping in through the window.

“Not if you tie your self-worth to some maniac. Wake up!” Matt yells the last two words in this raw drawn out voice, its less anger, less rage. More unfiltered emotion. 

“Or don’t, but don’t come home if you are going to drag us through more shit, Edd won’t say it but he can’t handle it anymore. Either of you. Grow the fuck up Tom and pack it in,” Matt spits as he stands up, trying to wipe the residue on his jeans off as he turns to leave. He looks over his shoulder, light catching his ginger strands, setting them on fire.

He’s got this orange and yellow ring framing his head as he speaks, “You will never get anything from him, nothing worthwhile. Please come home, make the right choice and come home.” Matt’s voice breaks at the end.

You jam your palm into your face so you don’t have to look at him anymore. You don’t speak. You don’t move. You just wait until he is out and the door is closed to roll over on your side and fall back asleep.

____

You don’t recognize him. You’re the one with your face burned half off and the first one to recognize the other in this little quick-draw coincidence is him. He’s idling there in the grimy gas station, staring listlessly at a bag of chips in his hands when he seems to feel you looking at him. 

You think he has dried puke on his hoodie.

He looks like he’s going to say your name for a minute as he stands there looking at you, a myriad of expressions crossing his face split second. Too many for you to process, to understand. You want to take each one and remember it, understand the rainbow that displays itself before you before sealing off into a bland colorless wall. He’s looking at you the way he looks at those chips.

“Don’t do that. Say it. Say what you were going to say,” You say and it’s hard to keep the subtle tremor out of your voice. “Wow Tord, I really got you good. I really fucked everything up for you, huh.” You spit a little as you voices the expletive. Tom just looks at you, blandly, disinterested.

“I’m sorry,” comes the monotone reply with no real expression of earnest feeling behind the words.

You smile, digging your canines into your lip as you do so, “You’re sorry. No, no that’s my line isn’t it?”

They just stand in silence and Tom is still looking at you like a zombie or something and you wants to snap. To fist your hand in Tom’s hair hand slam his whole head into the wall until something a little more verbose than “I’m sorry” comes out.

“Isn’t it though? I tried to kill you after all. Nearly did. Do you hear me Tom? I’m sorry,” The word comes out in a high little whisper and Tom still doesn’t really move or seem to process his words. He feels like he’s in a simulation, a dream.

“It’s alright.”

It’s anything but alright but you merely smile tightly and look him up and down before nodding. “Next time, don’t leave the job half baked, I’ll be sure to make the consequences far more painful if you do,” You say, and your turning your back and walking out. Your car is full of gas and you didn’t realize how raw this aging open wound still was, so you peel out of the station on a quest to get anywhere else, be anything else. You become a fading trail of dust on the horizon.  
_____

You didn’t finish the job. That’s the solo thought that comes into your head out of all this. You never finished it. He’s out there, half alive, still pursuing those same demented dreams now with an equally demented face, and you did that.

It reminds you of how when you were younger you would smash ants that crawled on you. Sometimes they stopped moving instantly. Some of them however squirmed on the ground desperate for respite from living.

So when the time comes you join the army. 

They teach you how to dig deep down, pull up that old rage and temper it into something useful. You think of his face as you pull yourself up over the bar, think of those scars, those old wounds. The broken look on Edd’s face as he scrambles around trying to comprehend what happened.

It makes pulling the trigger easy. Aiming easy. Not thinking about it too much easy.

Too easy. But it all becomes moot at the end because…

You aren’t the one that gets him. Not really. Someone else catches him off with a grenade that throws him until he’s a bloody skidmark and his vehicle is off the side of the mountain, crunching as it tumbles down. You see him there, with half his skin sloughed off somewhere a few feet behind and you look at him and he looks up at you with his one good eye, that is now about the only good thing on him.

And you see the question he can’t voice, because you aren’t sure if those parts of him are still there and if they are, if they even function. But you know the question so you look at him and you nod. A slow, leisurely thing.

You have your gun. Issued to you day one. You can take it apart and put it back together blindfolded, you know every inch, every ridge, every finite piece of it.

You think about how you imagined things going. Some bloody bullet hail where one of you dies in the fury and that’s it, you go home and the other gets buried and that’s how it goes. A crime of necessity.

But he’s here now and you didn’t fire the bullet and you don’t have to, because you can see the expiration date ticking down on its own. 

And you are thinking back to that one night, so, so far ago. Was it a decade now? You are so old despite being so young. You think back to that time, riding the gap, the red lights ahead the white ones behind. The dust is kicking up and getting in your eyes, pricking them as you line up.

It’s so funny how with age you can see the built upon layers of a person. The discarded people they used to be that crumble down as the foundation of someone new forms on top. The whole is gone but the elements linger.

You don’t kill him out of necessity. You don’t pull the trigger to save yourself. In your own way, you’re saving him. It crosses your mind as the bullet crosses his.

As the sun sets and everything fades into the shade and it’s lying in the dust, soaking itself in deeper. You sit next to it because where are you going to go? Home? 

The first and last time you kill, it’s out of mercy.

**Author's Note:**

> idk why the fuck I wrote this 2nd person. Dont ask because I dont know. Probs will not happen again idk.
> 
> Anyways say hello @plsnskanks.tumblr.com and tell me what a little edgy bitch I am.


End file.
